Chapter Text
“Red-5, armed and ready.”
“Skywalker, your voice,” Wedge hissed over the comms.
“Shit!” Leia cursed and flipped the switch on the voice-changer clasped around her throat. Her voice came out sounding exactly like Luke’s as she repeated, “Red-5, armed and ready.”
Everyone who’d been at Yavin knew the ruse for what it was. The entire Red squadron, in the process of being renamed the Rouge Squadron, knew and approved of what Leia was doing.
Luke Skywalker, the son of a Jedi General from the Clone Wars who showed up just in the nick of time to save the entire Rebellion from the Death Star? He was a myth. He was a cover, meant to protect Leia Organa.
Even Han begrudgingly agreed to the ruse. No one but Leia knew where (or who) Lukka was, and in all the paperwork, he was listed as MIA, presumed dead. No one actually believed he was dead, especially not those who knew Vader was his sperm donor, but whether they believed he was running on his own because the Alliance made him feel unwelcome or believed Vader captured him, they all agreed he needed the protection of someone else claiming his single greatest achievement.
Lukka both hated and appreciated it.
The story behind the story for those who didn’t know exactly where Luke had been transferred to was that he was off training to be a Jedi. For the Plasma Devil survivors who would likely suspect that he’d been killed or taken by Vader, the ruse was meant to cast enough doubt that he wouldn’t be publicly executed for his “mass-murdering terrorist attack.”
Hopefully, all of this would muddy the waters enough for the Emperor not to grow too suspicious of the whole Fett situation. Not that Leia let anyone know about the Fett situation. As far as she was concerned, Ahsoka – and Rex just because of how close those two seemed – was not to be trusted with anything regarding Lukka. They’d probably guess if they ever heard about Boba Fett suddenly gaining a spouse, but Leia would not confirm.
All of that was beside the point if Leia couldn’t embrace the Skywalker ability to fly, which was why she was here, taking part in a training flight over Vrogas Vas with Lukka paying more attention to her than his own surroundings. His memories were hers to access, but that didn’t give her the muscle memory and instincts he’d cultivated during his teen years. Reaching out with the Force was also less intuitive for her than him, so it was a steep learning curve.
A TIE Advanced fell out of hyperspace practically right on top of them, a too-familiar black hole announcing itself like an implosion. Leia recoiled. She wasn’t good enough of a pilot to face off against Darth Vader. Not yet. Lukka swelled under her skin, and the world pivoted.
Leia blinked rapidly at her hazy surroundings. She hissed and would have pulled away from the sudden pain in her fingers if a hand hadn’t caught the crook of her elbow and held her down.
What? There wasn’t anyone in the x-wing cockpit with her, just Artoo, and he didn’t have hands? But, no. Somehow, Lukka was the one in the X-wing? And she was on Tatooine, apparently.
Lukka switched their minds, somehow. The physical differences flooded her all at once. The body was wrong (but also not), the location was wrong (but also exactly where she expected to be), and everything hurt.
“Gods, why isn’t he on painkillers?” she muttered in Lukka’s voice, this time without a heavy choker on her throat.
More pain in her fingers, and now she was aware enough to realize that there was a young man with a head heavy with dreads intently working on the metal bones of her extended right hand. Loud music that seemed to shake the very ground pounded itself into her bones, and a familiar (but not) voice spoke directly into her ear.
“The artificial nerves need full feedback to sync up correctly. I thought you knew that.”
At her back, Lukka was fully focused on fighting Vader again, and this time her help would be more of a hinderance than anything else, so she stayed focused on her immediate surroundings and the lover (maybe husband? She could hear Lukka’s thoughts and still wasn’t sure what passed unspoken between the two in regards to their relationship) Leia absolutely did not trust.
Leia moved her eyes but not her head, and there was Fett without his armor. For all that he supposedly had the same face as Rex and every other clone in the Rebellion, Leia doubted that she’d ever be able to mistake him for one of them, even if they had been the same age. Maybe it was the Force enhancing her perception, or maybe his eyes really held the exact same gaze she once saw in a mountain lion back home.
Leia had no idea what her brother saw in the brutal, scarred man, nor did she feel like digging through his memories to find out.
Some sort of realization passed over his face, and the eyes of a mountain lion disappeared behind walls of beskar, the hand holding her elbow down quickly but non-urgently moving away. With minimal movement, he somehow managed to turn what had felt like a looming presence into a polite distance. Begrudgingly, Leia admitted herself impressed.
She still felt Light despite the body-swap, so the blue eyes must have tipped him off. Whether he understood that he was looking at Leia was yet to be determined.
The atmosphere was not conducive to conversation, but Leia wouldn’t let that stop her.
“I have rules,” she informed the bounty hunter, “and he doesn’t get to ignore them just because he’s not under my command, anymore.”
Polite eyes hiding a hint of possessiveness dropped to her lips, and no, it didn’t feel any less skeevy knowing he was staring like that at Lukka, not her.
“Yeah?” was all the prompt she needed.
“First, no torture, for any reason, with the Force or not. Second, collateral damage must be minimized as far as conceivably possible with allowances for resource availability and risk of permanent bodily harm to oneself or allies. Third, if there is a nonviolent option with low risk of harm to oneself or one’s allies that can be taken to achieve an objective, this option should be tried first.
“Fourth – and I’ll admit this one is useless in his current position – surrendering enemies should be treated well and arrested. Fifth and last – and new, but I didn’t think I’d need to spell it out – permanent bodily harm to oneself or one’s allies is never an acceptable outcome, and death should not be courted when there is any other conceivable option.”
“I’m going to need torture defined, Princess.”
Well, that answered that question. Fett was apparently the expert in rolling with ridiculous assumptions that turned out to be true.
“Anything that gives me flashbacks to Imperial Interrogation.”
Fett tilted his head in thought. “That’s fair. Who knows what happened to Luke?”
“Me, you, that motherfucker, and whomever he tells.”
Fett snorted, the sound mostly drowned out by the wall shaking music. “And who on your end knows about our relationship?”
“Han Solo, Chewbacca, Ahsoka Tano, and a clone named Rex.”
“Rex. Is he blonde?”
“I don’t know, he’s bald. With a white beard.”
“Does he have Jaig eyes on his helmet?” he clarified further at her visible confusion, “Looks like tooka ears?”
Leia rarely saw Commander Rex in his helmet, considering it looked so much like a stormtrooper helmet. But, she had seen it, and she knew she did because she could remember thinking the design looked oddly cute. She nodded.
“I don’t know how to feel that the motherfucker gave him to you.”
“It doesn’t line up with his MO,” Fett agreed.
“As lovely as this conversation is, I need to return to what I was doing. Please consider switching sides with your freelance work. Break his heart, and I’ll break your neck with a blaster bolt.”
Leia returned to herself just in time to begrudgingly agree to her brother’s latest suicidally reckless stunt.